A new Congressional Budget Office report shows the Treasury
will exhaust its emergency borrowing authority - again - sometime between March
and June 2014 unless Congress suspends or increases the nation's debt limit.

The government shut down for 16 days in October until
Congress reached a temporary funding deal and a short-term increase to the debt
ceiling. That funding deal expires Jan. 15 and the government will hit its
debt ceiling Feb. 7, forcing the Treasury Department to resort to what it calls
"emergency measures" to keep funds flowing. Those emergency measures would be exhausted
in the spring time frame, according to CBO.

"By CBO's estimate, the treasury might be unable to fully
pay its obligations starting in March, but depending on the timing and magnitude
of tax refunds and receipts in February, March, and April, the treasury might
be able to continue borrowing into May or early June," the report notes.

The debt ceiling deadline comes at a particularly lean time
for the federal government, according to the report.

"Overall, the federal government is expected to run a
significant deficit for fiscal year 2014. Within the year, deficits tend to be
large in February and March, when significant amounts of tax refunds are
issued, but the government normally runs a large surplus in April, when final
payments of individual income taxes for the preceding calendar year are due,"
the report notes.

If Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling and the Treasury
Department exhausts its other measures, certain government obligations could be
delayed and others could go unpaid, a situation economists have
said would be disastrous.

During the October shutdown, the CBO estimated as much as 32
percent of the government's bills would go unpaid during if a debt-ceiling
lapse occurred, including $12 billion in Social Security benefits on Oct. 23,
$6 billion in interest payments on Oct. 31, and $55 billion in Medicare, Social
Security, military and veterans benefits.